Azure – Azure Site Recovery (ASR)

Recently I got a chance to work on Azure Site Recovery. Today In this article we will discuss on Azure Site Recovery (ASR) .

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) :Azure Site Recovery is Microsoft’s solution for disaster recovery. ASR allows us to replicate our on-premises systems into Azure and keep them synchronized at all times. ASR is cross compatible with all types of on-premises environments including Hyper-V, VMware, and physical servers, so we should not bother about the source, we will be able to replicate it into Azure so that when disasters and outages occur, we can easily fail-over to our replicated environment and continue working. When services are resumed we simply fail back to your primary location with uninterrupted access. We an also permanently fail-over to a new environment in azure as a migration task.

ASR as a disaster recovery solution : It’s data protection strategy keeps our business running when unexpected events occur. There are many benefits from ASR but following are the major disaster recovery benefits.

Cost : It’s Quick recovery times result in gain of revenue, protecting an entire environment with traditional Disaster Recovery (DR) solution is expensive.

Complexity : Easy to protect complex environment and applications using this DR solution.

Protect workloads: Some workload or application benefited by this DR model in case of new licencing or reconfiguration cost.

ASR as a migration solution : Like disaster recovery, ASR can also be used as a Migration solution. We can consider this as a best migration solution for cloud, which will migrate our component to Azure. Following are the major benefits of Azure Site Recovery (ASR) as migration solution.

Migrate from multiple environments : Using ASR we can migrate from VMware,Hyper-V,Physical,Azure,AWS and from any OS like, Linux and Windows Workloads.

Migrate Applications with minimal impact to users : Move a single application or a complete data-center to Azure with near-zero downtime and near-zero data loss.

No Impact migration testing: When replicating workloads into Azure, we can execute test fail-over to ensure migration readiness without affecting environment users. No Site Recovery charges for Migration for first 31 days.

Different between ASR as disaster recovery solution and ASR as Migration solution:

For disaster recovery, we are replicating machines on a regular basis to Azure. When an outage occurs, we fail-over the machines from the primary site to the secondary Azure site, and access them from there. When the primary site is available again, we failing back from Azure to primary site.

For migration, we are replicating on-premises machines to Azure, or Azure VMs to a secondary region. Then we fail-over the VM from the primary site to the secondary, and complete the migration process. There’s no fail-back involved.